Dreaming Out Loud
by wewerethebestrichard
Summary: In concept, it's much like sleep-talking; in the embarrassment it causes, much like wetting the bed. In any case, it started happening when he was only a few decades old.


When he wakes up, it's dark.

That's the thing that betrays oddity - the cells are always brightly lit. Loki thinks it's a trick to humiliate prisoners. When you're in the pits beneath a palace, a hallway's walk from the torture chambers, you expect blackness and filth, a stink of familiarity, garbage for the garbage. It's far worse to sit under the white lights, staring through the gilded walls. The place creates a feeling of constant, battering inferiority, and the sense that one is forever being scrutinized. Dissected by the light. Loki doesn't let it bother him, but it must drive some other inmates insane eventually.

So when he opens his eyes and sees nothing, he stays very still, listening for a threat.

It's silent in the cell block.

His eyes don't adjust to the low light. Something is very wrong. Not that he can bring himself to care - if there is danger, he has a rabid sense of readiness, he wants to bite at it and dare it to draw his blood.

His eyes still don't adjust to the light.

Stiffly, he rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling.

It's slathered with stars.

That shocks him. The surprise jolts over his body and he stays frozen, still wary, more disorientated than ever. He recognizes the constellations, he is still in Asgard, surely he is even still in his cell. But when he turns his head, he can't see his bedding or his pillows, he sees a rainbow, he sees the glitter of the bridge. There is no sea breeze, but here he is, here is the bridge and below it the ocean, and above him the massive dome of the outside world, nebulae and strings of planets. Everything is deafeningly quiet.

He recognizes this, in more ways than one. He knows this scene well enough to expect Thor beside him, and he growls at the memory, it sticks in his throat, he chokes and for a black second, cannot breathe.

* * *

Dreaming out loud. In concept, it's much like sleep-talking; in the embarrassment it causes, much like wetting the bed. In any case, it started happening when he was only a few decades old.

Thor had become quite the fine little warrior - golden hair and combat bruises all the time. Loki had something, too, something from his mother, she had given him magic and he grew it all the time. The first sign of the unexpected side-effect came one night Loki was having a particularly vivid nightmare.

It was a summer where he came down with bad dreams like a fever, he had them all the time, and he woke up that night to Thor screaming. As soon as he sat up in bed, the noise stopped, and, shaken, he demanded to know what was going on.

"I saw -" Thor was panting. "I saw a lot of really tall - probably Frost Giants - they were all coming towards my bed and there were trees all growing up through the room - I swear I saw it! I wasn't even sleeping!"

"But that was _my_ bad dream," Loki said, incredulously. "How could you have been seeing it?"

"Boys?" The door cracked open, Frigga's voice came through. "What's going on in here?"

"Thor's having my nightmares."

Frigga came in all the way, tucking a shawl around her night robes. "What do you mean, Loki?"

Thor cut in. "All I know is that there were a _lot_ of monsters in here a minute ago. I saw them with my own two eyes. I did." There were tears on his cheeks, and Loki felt a deep pang of guilt.

"That's ridiculous, it was my dream. They weren't really here," he insisted.

Frigga sat down by Thor and kissed the top of his head. Loki felt the guilt again, slamming through his stomach.

"It's just imagination," Frigga assured them.

Except that it happened again. Thor kept having visions of what was on Loki's mind during sleep. When Loki woke up, the looming landscapes crowding their shared bedroom would snap out of existence, but the fear they produced would last for tearful hours, and Loki would crouch in his covers, horribly ashamed. The shame didn't go away when they figured out what it was.

"Being able to generate illusions so powerful without even trying shows an incredible talent for magic, Loki," his mother told him. "And it also proves what I've always said, that you have an abnormally rich imagination."

Imagination be damned - the dream projections made Thor afraid to go to bed. And so Loki learned to control it, to become so proficient in managing his illusions that suppressing them when he was asleep came as second nature.

* * *

He hadn't slipped up for centuries.

But here he is, slipping up, waking in a world of his own making, a nightmare. A nightmare. He clenches his fists, and the harsh prison light bleeds through into his world again, cutting through the illusions in sharp beams. The stars melt away into the ceiling, the rainbow bridge vanishes into his bed, the white walls push themselves close around him. He breathes in, the acrid air of imprisonment, much better than freedom with _him._

He can remember the salty smell of the endless waterfall, the roar just as infinite as the flow. He remembers the day that the dream was regurgitating back in his face, and he doesn't want to - he brings the vision back with a simple gesture, his fingers tense and hooked, his body full of anger, anger as energy, anger as the desire to see everything around him suffer. He looks at the dreamscape and starts to hit it apart with his hands, turning it bit by bit back into nothing, he has to destroy it inch by inch, the choked rage still weighs on his tongue. The bridge falls apart, as he created it, he destroys it. The sky bleeds away. The stars go out. The two boys, lying side by side, Loki tears apart blindly - one of them has his hand raised towards the heavens and is pointing out the patterns and constellations, he doesn't know which, only that he wants to kill.

The sound comes out, and it is ugly, a harsh hiss of hatred.

If only he had something other than air to rip apart.

If only his own mind wasn't the saboteur in this entire scene.

He clenches a fist to his forehead, willing the rage to die down just enough to let him sleep. Let me sleep. Just let me sleep.

He lays back down, and resolves not to have any more dreams.


End file.
